Twibies.com – The ultimate twitter resource for designers

Gopal Raju — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:50:24 +0000

Happy New Year friends! Being a freelancer gives me time to come up with more posts

Before we dive into more details about Twibies, let me ask you something. Have you ever checked the page rank of your twitter profile? Well… I did recently and it turned out to be 5/10. I was really surprised to see this initially, but upon further research I figured out that my twitter background/theme was featured on many sites.

What does that mean?

Simple… Design matters! And here’s something useful for designers!

Twibies.com - The ultimate collection of twitter bird illustrations, icons, themes and other freebies.

Most of you would be already familiar with this site I assume. At least, for those who have visited IndoFolio. This is my second initiative to help out designers by bringing all twitter freebies (useful for designers) under one roof.

What makes Twibies unique?

Twibies is exclusively for designers who are looking out for twitter freebies and it leaves no reason to search for or bookmark twitter icon roundups anymore! Twibies is the one stop solution for you. I’ve tried my best to make the interface as simple as possible.

Another interesting thing is that Twibies lets you choose the file format of icons. So if you are looking for a psd icon, all you need to do is choose Photoshop(PSD) from the dropdown. Its as simple as that!

Question for designers: Did you create a free twitter icon set recently?

Dont’t forget to post it on Twibies It has a page to submit your freebie (whether its a theme, an icon set or any design based on twitter).

The form is really simple and wouldn’t ask for your neighbours date of birth and all that crap

Wanna receive an update whenever a twibie is posted?

You can either subscribe the RSS or just follow me on twitter. I would love to hear suggestions and feedbacks from YOU – the real users!

Announcing the launch of IndoFolio

Gopal Raju — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:33:47 +0000

Good News! I’ve quit my day job to get to do the things I enjoy doing very much on the internet! Yes, that means I’ll be spending more time on ProductiveDreams and taking up freelance projects at the same time. As a first step, I am launching my portfolio – Indofolio.com

In this post I would like to give you a brief overview on IndoFolio and its design.

Why IndoFolio?

I wanted to use a domain name that makes it clear that I am from India and Indo is the most popular prefix used to indicate India. My second requirement was to include “folio” which makes it obvious that this is my portfolio.

Concept behind the design

My name “Gopal” is another manifestation of Krishna who was one of the incarnations/avatars of Lord Vishnu according to Hindu mythology. This inspired me to include other avatars of Lord Vishnu as well. Nothing religious! This was just an attempt to come up with a unique design concept.

Just to let you know, I am a great fan of Russian Art! and was very concerned about achieving an Indo-Russian effect. Though it took me some time playing with Fireworks and Photoshop, I’m happy with the final output.

Softwares Used

The initial draft of IndoFolio was created using Fireworks and was purely vector. Then I took it to photoshop, to burn and dodge a few areas which helped me achieve the “painting” effect. I believe Photoshop gives more control when it comes to burning and dodging.

In the following images, you can compare the Fireworks and Photoshop version of the avatars. I’ve given a one line description about each avatar, for those who are curious

Matsya – The Fish Incarnation is the first one among all.

Kurma- Lord Vishu assumed the form of a tortoise for this avatar.

Krishna (aka Gopal) is considered to be the 8th avatar.

Varaha- The Boar, is one of the interesting incarnations which appeared in order to defeat a demon.

and finallyVamana, the dwarf brahmin.

These are just 5 of the 10 incarnations of Lord Vishnu.

Image Optimization

Optimizing the images was a challenge as I had to maintain the image quality. Transparency being a major thing to consider, I had to convert most of the images to 24bit PNGs. I used some online image optimizers like PNGCrush to reduce the file size.

HTML/CSS Development

This was really challenging as my goal was to create a single page website using these avatars. I planned to use JQuery to make the site more lively, different and user friendly. Using JQuery intensely for a single page website is no sin

After doing some research, I decided go ahead with horizontal parallax. For more details about Parallax check out my previous blog post (I created this post while working on IndoFolio).

So that’s it! I would be glad to hear your comments (good or bad) on IndoFolio.

Productivedreams.com » Launch